In the past, people spent a lot of time chatting with other players in MMORPGs. According to MeinMMO author Anny Bader, this rarely happens today and she misses it.
MMORPGs are dying. I do not mean that the genre is dying, but that the games themselves feel extinct, even though thousands of players are online. I have been passionately playing MMORPGs for years and still log in daily. But one thing has been increasingly diminishing over time: communication in chat.
Unless bots are propagating their annoying ads, almost no one in modern MMORPGs like Lost Ark and New World talks on global channels. I have noticed this more and more for months, and I am not the only one.
In a reddit thread, players recently discussed why MMORPGs feel less intense than before. “MMORPGs were the OG social networks,” writes one user. Others say that social interactions in the games have now been replaced, which is why they do not feel the same as before. I share this opinion.
I lack the urge to log in
Back then, we are talking about the year 2010, there was always a lot going on in the in-game chat of my current MMORPG Metin2 – both in the server chat and in the town. Players were hanging around and were sometimes online just to chat. I was one of them.
Additionally, I had many blinking messages at the edge of my screen: private messages. These could only be sent and read when both players were online. The history was not saved, so no one could “ghost” someone for days as happens today when sending a message.
Today, it is different. No one in the MMORPG is waiting for me. If they are, they write to me on Discord. The urge to log in and see what is happening has disappeared.
Can the trend be reversed? Hard to say. One would hope so, because 2023 is getting some great new MMOs:
In the past, something always happened on my server. In between, I was in a guild that was constantly arguing. This happened in the guild chat of the game and could not be read anywhere else – I wanted to be a part of it and not miss the drama.
Furthermore, I had exchanged ICQ numbers or Skype IDs with some players, so I logged in to chat with them. I also talked to people on ICQ and Skype, but there were no gigantic Discord servers with almost infinite capacities back then.
Of course, I also played the MMORPG, but the social aspect was an important one for me back then. The games felt much more alive.
A significant factor: Dungeon finders make it too easy in-game. Group searching happens automatically, so no one has to interact with others. In modern MMORPGs like Lost Ark, I would not even dare to message someone in the game and ask for a dungeon.
Discord and Twitter instead of World Chat
If I want to keep up with what the community is doing in my favorite MMORPGs today, I do not have to log in. A glance at Twitter, Reddit, or Discord is usually enough since everyone exchanges information here anyway. Organization is done through these platforms and anyone can read about what is happening.
MMORPGs do not feel as social to me as they used to. The conversations take place on other platforms. The in-game chat can even be turned off, which many do.
Also, players exchange information in Facebook groups. Hardly anyone uses communication channels within the MMORPG itself. If you send a message, it might not even get through because the other person turned off the chat. Everyone knows that one player who never responds…
You have confirmed my impression, by the way. We recently asked you on MeinMMO if you even use global chats. Not many of you have voted yet, but the trend is that hardly anyone chats.
Final Fantasy XIV is the only MMORPG in which I have directly experienced social interaction in the last few years. Otherwise, everything happens through social media, which I find very unfortunate. MMORPGs are losing a piece of their soul.
My colleagues Benedict Grothaus and MeinMMO demon Cortyn experience it quite differently, by the way. In WoW, they constantly have interactions with other players in global channels.
Maybe I am playing the wrong games, maybe the two of them are just lucky. But all of this is greatly diminishing my desire to play. I barely want to log in anymore.
